Preservation Society

The Pleshakov Piano Museum

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, July 28, 2008

An afternoon in Hunter. A darkened vestibule. A closed door. There’s music on the other side. Faint, twinkling, beautiful. It’s Chopin’s fourth ballade. Turn the knob and push the door open, ever so delicately…

The sunny, white-walled, air-conditioned space is the size of a dance hall. This facility, however, is not one meant for dancing, but for listening and gazing, gazing at the dozens of breathtakingly gorgeous antique pianos that take up roughly two thirds of the room, their richly polished wood glinting in the light. Lining one long wall is a shelf holding hundreds of LPs and clothbound books; framed recital posters and a Baroque tapestry hang above tables filled with stacks of 19th-century music scores, their yellowed covers adorned with elaborately flourished, gold leaf lettering. At the opposite end of the long room sits a lone gray-haired man, his back to the door, playing one of the magnificent instruments. He glances back a couple of times but never lifts his hands from the keys, continuing to play for the next 15 minutes or so, until the supremely moving piece is completed. But when it does end, it ends too soon. One wishes the perfect scene could’ve just gone on forever. And if the player has his way, in some form it will. The pianist is Vladimir Pleshakov, and this is the museum that bears his name.

The Pleshakov Piano Museum’s first incarnation was as the Pleshakov Music Center, opened by the musician and his wife and fellow concert pianist Elena Winther in Hudson in 2002. But eventually, that city’s higher property taxes forced the couple to relocate, and they purchased a house in Jewett, reopening the museum in nearby Hunter’s Doctorow Center for the Arts in 2006. At the facility, Pleshakov and Winther teach master classes and present concerts and lectures.

But of course the real attraction is the museum’s collection of dozens of absolutely stunning antique pianos, organs, and harpsichords, many of which have been donated or loaned by collectors from around the world. Several of these highly ornate pieces date from as far back as the 1700s—and all of them have been fully restored to be completely playable; indeed, the couple frequently stages programs of period music using the appropriate instruments. As far as the museum’s staff knows, no other site in America has a remotely comparable collection of vintage keyboards.

“Each of these instruments is a living time machine,” says Pleshakov, his Russian accent still intact after decades in America. “They represent the true height of human endeavor, and they show what life and people and the composers and musicians were really like in their day.” He points to a 1789 Longman & Broaderip pianoforte, made when Mozart was composing. “The keys are so sensitive. You can pretty much blow on them and it will play,” he says, letting his fingers dance across the keyboard. “It sounds soft compared to a modern grand [piano], but in its day it was a very loud instrument, because everything else in the world was quieter then. So, of course, the violins and cellos of the chamber groups were softer too.” Nearby is the museum’s other crown jewel, an inlay-festooned 1826 Tichener, built for Russian royalty and acquired by the couple at a California estate sale years ago for “the price of an old jalopy.”